“An Opulence Unexpected”: Examples of Red Morocco’s Use in Bookbindings

The history of the book is predicated on the idea that the book itself as an object is significant in its own right, not simply on its printed content alone. Which materials were used, how they were made, and who made them all speak to a vast network of economic, environmental, and human systems that ...

AAS Catalog Is an Award-Winner!

On May 17, 2018, during the annual meeting of the American Historical Print Collector’s Society (AHPCS) in California, the American Antiquarian Society received the Ewell L. Newman Book Award for our exhibition catalog Radiant with Color & Art: McLoughlin Brothers and the Business of Picture Books, 1858–1920. The Newman Book Award recognizes and encourages outstanding ...

My Thirty Years’ Adventure with McLoughlin Brothers

The exhibition Radiant with Color & Art: McLoughlin Brothers and the Business of Picture Books, 1858–1920, now on display at the Grolier Club in New York, is the culmination of my three decades’ worth of work in cataloging, documenting, and interpreting the output of this titan New York publisher that dominated color picture book publishing ...

Designing McLoughlin: Finding Inspiration for the Exhibition Catalog

When we were faced with the challenge of designing the catalog for the McLoughlin Brothers exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York in-house, the task seemed a bit overwhelming at first. The collection material featured was already so lively and engaging. But the answer quickly became clear when we began creating a plan for ...

Upcoming Exhibition on McLoughlin Brothers is “Radiant with Color & Art”

From December 6 through February 3, highlights from AAS’s stunning collection of some three thousand McLoughlin Brothers books, games, and artwork will be out of the stacks and on display at the famous Grolier Club (47 E. 60th St., New York) in the exhibition Radiant with Color & Art: McLoughlin Brothers and the Business of ...

Tenth Annual Adopt-a-Book – Now Launched!

Springtime means it is time for the AAS Adopt-a-Book fundraiser! A hearty thank you to all who have participated in this popular event in the past. We have raised over $125,000 for acquisitions over the last nine years. Today, Tuesday, April 4th, we launch our tenth annual online catalog of "orphans" to be adopted. This year, ...

Show the Love: McLoughlin Christmas Books

One year from now AAS will be opening the exhibition Radiant with Color and Light: McLoughlin Brothers and the Business of Picture Books, 1858-1920 at the Grolier Club in New York. The show will feature nearly two hundred books, games, watercolors, toys, and ephemera, all produced by the McLoughlin Bros. firm and their contemporaries. The ...

1775 Breaking News: The First Published Map of the Revolutionary War

I. De Costa A Plan of the Town and Harbour of Boston, and the Country Adjacent with the Road from Boston to Concord Shewing the Place of the Late Engagement between the King’s Troops & the Provincials. London, 1775. Engraving, hand colored 15 x 19.5 inches, on sheet 19 x 23.5 inches. American Antiquarian Society.

Guest author Allison K. Lange is an assistant professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, was an AAS AHPCS Fellow in 2011-2012, and helped curate the Leventhal Map Center’s “We Are One” exhibition. Lange received her PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Currently she is completing a manuscript on the visual culture of ...

Global Encounters in Worcester

The AAS staff and the Holy Cross students, faculty, and staff involved in the exhibition.

We know how to keep busy in the dead of winter here at the American Antiquarian Society.  In late 2012 Patricia Johnston, the Professor Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J. chair in fine arts at the College of the Holy Cross, approached AAS with the idea of having one of her Holy Cross classes research and ...

With a French Accent goes to Bordeaux, France!

This fall, the American Antiquarian Society, with the generous support of the Terra Foundation, is sending an important exhibition of American lithographs to the Musée Goupil in Bordeaux, France.  The exhibition, À la mode francaise: La lithographie aux États-Unis 1820 to 1860, will be opening on September 6 and closing on November 10, 2013. The ...

Old worlds

"Poetry, as well as History, has consecrated the achievements of Columbus.  But we must leave, for the present, to History and Poetry the pleasing task of dwelling on individual characters.  The appropriate researches of the Antiquary aim at objects less exposed to ordinary notice, yet illustrative often of the interests of nations."  So said William ...

It’s a Small World under the Big Top

This month Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010 opened at the Bard Graduate Center Galleries in New York (September 12, 2012 to February 3, 2013).  You can learn more about the exhibition here. Two former AAS fellows, Matthew Wittmann and Brett Mizelle, contributed essays to the related (and very substantial) publication, The American Circus (New ...

Ours…to fight for

It is probably not news to readers of this blog that The New York Times recently, and favorably, reviewed the American Antiquarian Society's Grolier Club exhibition "In Pursuit of a Vision." But readers familiar with the two societies neither will be surprised that the AAS has exhibited at the Grolier Club in the past (in ...